


cataract

by blacksatinpointeshoes



Series: jon sims v the nhs [5]
Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (statements), Addiction, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Jon is trying, Other Characters Are Mentioned, Vomiting, Withdrawal, but this? this is basically that, canon typical Woah There Buddy Don't Make That Decision, it's not going well, not explicit because it's gross, post mag 147, there's no tag for 'character fucks up every relationship they have', we all should appreciate Dr Bright more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 19:43:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20140957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacksatinpointeshoes/pseuds/blacksatinpointeshoes
Summary: There’s a way to strip dignity softly, and then there’s the way to do it correctly.or, Jon's having a rough night.





	cataract

**Author's Note:**

> therapy au is back and _checks notes_ sadder than ever! let it be known that tma always has a special way of completely screwing with my brain. enjoy!
> 
> working title: _just fuck up jon dude_

Disjointed. Jon’s disjointed. He’s off. He’s wrong. He’s — sideways. It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad, Jon’s — bad. He can barely think for all the bad, for all the wrong, for all the disjointed. His brain is filled with fog, filled with cotton, filled with fuzz, fuzz up to his throat, up to his eyes, coming out the ears. Everything is off and wrong and disjointed, like drenched-then-dried puzzle pieces made of warped cardboard that don’t fit right together anymore. 

This is the pretty way to put it. This is the poetic way to put it. This is the literary way to put it. There’s a way to strip dignity softly, and then there’s the way to do it correctly. Jon’s not  _ disjointed,  _ like an honours’ student who’s just gotten a C, he’s not  _ sideways,  _ like someone who’s received the news that they’re being laid off. That’s all too poetic, it’s all too pretty. 

Jon’s spending his third night in a row vomiting in the Institute bathroom under fluorescent lights that are so loud he can barely think, wondering if denying himself his god will kill him.  _ His god.  _ That’s disgusting. It’s disgusting, and Jon hates it, the way he hates the high of taking a statement, the way he hates the thrill of the hunt, the way he doesn’t hate it at all. Instinct says that the Beholding needs to be fed, that he needs to be fed. It’s been rewritten into his core, and Jon can’t  _ stop.  _

Well. He’s trying to stop. He’s trying to stop  — not by going cold turkey, he’s not an  _ idiot,  _ but by reading small statements. Old statements. Statements that tickle the back of his neck and are over before the chill reaches the base of his spine. Jon feels physically hungry, which one would  _ assume  _ would be because he hasn’t eaten in days, but once, Daisy disappointedly stared at him until Jon made himself a piece of toast, which he’d thrown up about five minutes after it reached his stomach.

For whatever reason, eating doesn’t  _ work  _ for Jon anymore. For whatever reason, eating doesn’t make Jon feel full unless he’s read or taken a statement, first. For whatever reason, Jon can’t keep anything down unless he’s read or taken a statement first. Because he’s a monster, Jon can’t eat. It’s not even that he doesn’t want to, because he’s trying. He’s  _ trying.  _

He feels like an animal sitting at the dinner table, making itself sick with food it was never meant to consume. He feels like he is a thing trying to be a person. And God, he’s so nauseous, so stricken by headaches and the roiling assault of withdrawal, that Jon’s dim consciousness doesn’t allow him to imagine a world without consistent, deserved agony. Jon doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s had a day without pain, a day without need. 

There is barely anything in his stomach to vomit except bile, so Jon is spending his third night after Annabelle Cane dry-heaving, bringing up not just spittle but static, the ever present desire to  _ persuade,  _ to  _ know.  _ The air is thick with it. Jon doesn’t know what part of him would convince someone to give their statement, unless he’s become so pitiable that his monstrosity is made sympathetic.

Everything just  _ hurts.  _ His joints, his head, the soles of his feet, it all creaks and snaps like old wicker chairs, and it all hurts. The inside of his throat is burning, scraped raw, and Jon chokes on the statements he could have taken, on the knowledge he could have stolen. If he goes outside right now, he  _ will  _ find someone to speak to. The instinct at the back of his neck tells him to walk three blocks West and lie in wait for a woman named Alina Moreau, who will be too distracted by her phone to notice that he is there, and when he asks if she needs help, she will speak, and speak, and speak, until Jon is temporarily satiated. 

He grinds the thought into the ground beneath his feet and is racked with a new wave of nausea, sent spiralling over the toilet bowl, these tiny,  _ pathetic  _ noises of pain leaving his mouth that sound nothing like he should. These small, whimpering sounds aren’t befit for Jon, aren’t befit for a  _ monster.  _ They sound human, they sound vulnerable, they sound needy, like a predator faking a wound, and God, Jon  _ hates  _ himself.

It’s— well. It’s not a realisation. He’s known for a while, he’s just never thought it so explicitly. Shouldn’t he hate himself, though? Melanie does. Basira does. Martin does, apparently— and _yes, _there are other people in the Archives, Jon _knows _this, but to lose _Martin_— Jon doesn’t know what sort of proof this is, but he knows that if Martin hates him, he’s crossed a line. If Martin hates him, Jon’s not sure if he’s redeemable. 

_ God,  _ he thinks sardonically, resting his head against the cold porcelain,  _ Dr Bright will have a field day with this.  _

Then Jon comes to three conclusions at the same time: one, that he has therapy today, two, that he doesn’t trust himself to go outside, and three, that he never cancelled. And look, he’s not thinking clearly. That’s what he tells himself when he pulls his mobile phone out of his pocket and dials. It’s just impulse, he tells himself, not the fact that he’s smelled a statement on Dr Bright since the first day he met her. It’s just courtesy, he tells himself, not hunger, not that sickly, amoral starvation. Jon can barely hear anything over the rush of compulsion in his ears. 

The line clicks to life with a puff of air and the rustle of sheets. “...Jon?” Dr Bright asks, her voice soft and throaty with sleep. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m — ” Jon swallows hard on the urge to ask, on the urge to steal, and can’t shove it down. “I’m not going to — I won’t make it tomorrow.” He wipes sticky hair off his forehead, tries to focus. Existing in his own mind is treading water in a flooded lake beside a broken dam. 

Dr Bright’s voice turns deliberate, careful. “What’s going on?” she asks, and there’s a distinct noise of her light clicking on as she sits up in bed. 

“I — I’m — ” A hesitation. Not too long, though; she’ll get suspicious, and there is static roaring in Jon’s head. There is  _ want  _ growing in his fingertips. “I’m very ill, Dr Bright,” he admits finally, and anyone in the world could hear that he’s telling the truth.

She pauses. “What’s  _ really  _ wrong?” Dr Bright asks, frowning on the other side of the line. Jon doesn’t know how he knows, he just does; the Eye is feeding him with the view of her, statement ripe for the picking. 

Jon slams the phone against the ground and throws up again. 

“Jon?” Dr Bright’s voice has jumped almost an octave with worry. “Jon, why are you calling me now?”

“Just — just to cancel,” he rasps, squeezing his eyes shut. “Sorry — ”  _ Sorry, I’m just hungry. Sorry, I’m starving. Sorry, I’d like to crack open your mind and find out the truth about everything that hurt you.  _

“No,” says Dr Bright, in a voice too soft for what Jon’s about to do, “it’s okay. Don’t be sorry. And if you’d like to tell me what’s going on, I’m here to listen, but if you don’t, I recommend that you get some sleep. I know I’ll be doing that.”

He can hear her shift, can see a split second image of Dr Bright reaching for her lightswitch, her thumb hovering over the ‘end call’ button, and even as Jon knows that this is bait provided by the Beholding to keep him desperate, he panics. “Wait.”

“Yes?” She sounds relieved that Jon is trusting her, that Jon feels safe enough after all these weeks of therapy to finally,  _ finally  _ open up. He’s not. He’s going to pry her apart, and he knows it will hurt, and he will never see Dr Bright again. She will see him in her nightmares. She will hate him. And it will hurt. 

And God, he’s so, so,  _ ravenous.  _ He’s so hungry that he knows the consequence and can’t care. 

Dr Bright’s voice is warm and solid on the other side of the phone, warm and solid and comforting and real, and it reeks of the supernatural. “I’m here,” she says, her tone welcoming, and Jon hungers for the satisfaction of the story. She is sodden with statement, with experience, with responsibility, and Jon is  _ starving.  _ He is insatiable and ill and treacherous and starving, and the static creeps into his eyes.

_ _ “Dr Bright,” he says, ragged, hand clenching the phone, and no, no, no, he  _ can’t,  _ he  _ can’t  _ do this, not with her, not with  _ her,  _ “Dr Bright, I — can you tell me — ”

It hangs in the air. It hangs, suspended, breath caught, wondering. There are so few lines he hasn’t crossed, so few bridges he hasn’t burned, but the words push themselves from Jon’s throat. “I need to know —”

“Jon,” she says, stern, sharp, and he gags on his words. There is a razor in her voice, the sound of a woman who has been… _ persuaded _ , the sound of a woman who has learned to build her mind a fortress, the sound of a woman who knows what Jon is, but God, he wants to  _ eat,  _ Jon wants to stop shaking, Jon wants his insides to stop folding on top of each other and squeezing. “What are you trying to ask me?”

(“I don’t  _ want  _ your statement!” Jon had cried in horror all those months ago, at their first therapy session, when he was worried about becoming a monster. That was another time, when Jon was clinging to the knowledge of what was right and what was wrong.)

And. 

And.

And.

God. What the hell has he done? What the hell is he trying to do?

Jon has a moment of rock-bottom lucidity. He has a moment of understanding. He has a moment of realisation, where he turns the Eye inwards and reconciles the fact that he would have carved out the memory of the only person who didn’t flee him when he woke up for his own exploitation, for his own  _ hunger.  _ And oh, God, he came  _ so close.  _

So he doesn’t respond. He can’t answer. He just retches again, in nausea and disgust. Dr Bright makes a sympathetic noise through the phone, and Jon hates that she still cares. She knows what he was trying to do to her, and she still  _ cares.  _

“Jon,” she says, again, and the monster can’t think or breathe or see for the fuzz that permeates his body and pulls him apart.  _ “Jon,”  _ Dr Bright calls, cutting through the fog. “Listen to me.”

“I’m here,” he croaks, not quite believing it, propping himself up against the wall and wiping his mouth. Dr Bright is breathing on the other end of the line and Jon can hear it, can hear  _ her,  _ and the compulsion fades. For a moment, he is a man. “I’m here.”

In the back of his mind, the Beholding rages. 

**Author's Note:**

> as always, I can be found hanging out on tumblr @thoughtsbubble, on twitter @ucbamba, (and a few rusty quill servers) if anyone would like to chat! thank you so much for reading, and comments/kudos are deeply appreciated :)


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